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Hell yes, just found the limited-trade 1st edition hardcover of Wizard & Glass at my local used-book shop, they obviously had no idea what it's worth because I picked it up for $15.  Only 40,000 were printed, I wonder how many are still in mint condition, or even in circulation/existence.
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Dec 2, 2011 19:18
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Ornamented Death posted:Plenty, by the looks of eBay. And it's not even that valuable within the realm of first editions. I mean, great find and all, but you won't be retiring off of a future sale Heh, I know. I've made it a goal of mine to get the first editions of all seven DT books, but never really thought I'd find any of the first four (without paying hundreds on eBay/Abebooks). I practically squeaked when I saw it on the shelf. It's the principle of the thing -- like finding a rookie card worth ten bucks in the nickel box. 
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Dec 2, 2011 21:23
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jackpot posted:I'm still missing 1 and 4: DT4 was rare and more expensive than I was willing to pay, and DT1 might as well have pages made of gold. I ran across a DT4 first edition hardcover (limited run) at Half-Price Books, and they didn't know what it was worth and sold it to me for $15. 
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Mar 24, 2012 15:50
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AlphaDog posted:I liked the ending of The Dark Tower, and I don't understand why people got so pissed off about it. Also, I can't help but wonder if the world gets a little more decrepit every time the cycle repeats itself. I mean, has it always been so post-apocalyptic, or is it getting worse and worse and worse until Roland gets everything right? Is it possible that he's running out of restarts? Is the next time the last try? Does he have everything he needs now?. I always took King at his word when he said that Browning's poem about Roland was the real ending, such that the cycle we have just read about was the penultimate loop, and that the next time will be the time Roland blows the Horn of Eld (which he has now, when he begins the last loop at the novels' end) for his friends and forefathers.
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Apr 13, 2012 17:22
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If he rewrites DT 5-7, I'll be so pissed at him that I'll wait almost ten minutes until after the bookstore opens on release day.
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May 2, 2012 21:45
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Edwardian posted:One of the best things about "The Wind Through the Keyhole" was Oy being alive. This was definitely the most heart-smashing point of the series. What made it so much worse for me is that my best friend is a Cairn terrier that acts just like that drat bumbler. If he starts sniffing the north wind I might freak out.
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May 4, 2012 02:52
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I'm tempted to say Long Walk is the best thing he's ever written, but a) in a long career with many really sterling moments, that's a hell of a statement, and b) if he really wrote that at the age of 19 and never topped it since, despite selling 80 trillion books, that's kind of depressing on several levels.
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Apr 12, 2013 22:08
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Bobbin Threadbare posted:Last year I picked up the Dark Tower series and managed to get through the whole thing without thinking it was a terrible story. Admittedly, it got stuck firmly up its own rear end by the end, but maybe because I read it all at once I saw pretty early on that that's where it would be heading, so I didn't mind as much. That and I got spoiled about him showing up in person before I started reading. The ending was perfect, the leadup to the ending was EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
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Apr 30, 2013 01:05
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Do not email that to King, or he will write a story about it. He wouldn't be able to help himself.
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Jul 24, 2013 16:44
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McConaughey is definitely more suited to Flagg, although I could get behind him as Stu. The better question is who will play Trash?
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Aug 27, 2014 16:47
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Damo posted:BTW I'm finally reading IT. Never read it. It's also been a while since I've read some King. I'm a hundred pages in and it's so goddamn King you bet your fur it is. Oh ayuh, you just wait 'till the last hundred pages. Please report back periodically with your thoughts.
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Aug 28, 2014 00:49
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maestro81 posted:I feel like King's writing style has changed over time. He just to write messed up stuff like Survivor Type. Now stories like Cell and Doctor Sleep are more like adventure books than real horror. Still awesome writing though. Cocaine is a hell of a drug.
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Sep 9, 2014 17:51
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Espequinn posted:I'm currently reading Mr.Mercedes and, while I'm not that far in I have to say it's enjoyable. It's not his best work, it's probably not even close to being his best but it's...something, it's entertaining it's interesting enough to keep you reading. But that's just my opinion Yeah, it's one of those that I found myself skim-reading, but at least I saw it through to the end. Passable, with some downright creepy bits that redeem the whole enterprise.
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Oct 27, 2014 16:02
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kenny powerzzz posted:The ending is a little weak I thought but I think of it more like the end of a journey kinda thing rather than the last twenty minutes of a blockbuster thing. Yeah, I actually thought the ending/reveal would have been more impactful had it been even more vague. The simple idea of everyone that dies immediately entering a very real Hell is terrifying enough to stand on its own merits in the reader's imagination. Maybe just slightly less detail would have made that even creepier. I don't think we needed to actually hear the phrase "Great Old Ones" or get such a physical description of Mother and the aliens. Hard to walk that line, though, and King has never been a master of subtlety.
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Nov 13, 2014 15:48
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Junkenstein posted:And then pretty much retconning what we see in Black House when it actually came to the climax of the Dark Tower and the Crimson King. EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!
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Nov 19, 2014 03:20
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d0s posted:Honestly I wouldn't mind four Stand movies if they were done right. If the good TV shows can hold your attention for five seasons, I don't see why a film version of The Stand couldn't do it. There is plenty of material that would be excellent to watch play out onscreen, again if the right people were in charge (I have no idea who these people would be anymore. I personally think that book should be treated in a really low-key almost art movie like way, the guy in that article who mentioned dogme 95 stuff was on the right track imo. this will never happen) With that kind of room, you've got plenty of time to make the "no great loss" chapter into the most cameo-laden 20 minutes of film ever made. Imagine the guest stars you could talk into shooting a minute-long scene from one of those vignettes.
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Dec 4, 2014 17:39
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And if anybody bitches about the ending, I'm gonna bugfuck on 'em. It was planned far in advance and was right on the nose. He has the horn now, which among other things implies he's progressed to the point where he won't let Jake drop, which is where his current cycle begins to fail, not coincidentally in the earliest action of DT1.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:01
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Victorkm posted:It wasn't the true ending people hated IIRC, it was right before when Roland got to the tower, only to face a crimson king who just through sneetches at him or whatever while making a pitiful "EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" sound. After he got into the tower, I at least thought it was fine. Well that is a completely correct opinion. Someone should have sat King down as he was writing the end, and made him re-read Insomnia so he'd remember what his readers were expecting.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:19
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Phanatic posted:That doesn't even work unless you ignore the extended re-release. Unless God's such a dick that even beyond annihilating most of the population of the developed world, he then decides that he's going to send Flagg to some random rain forest tribe to test them as well, even though they're still perfectly happy with their old world and don't seem eager to abandon it. I inferred that Flagg's reappearance was meant to be occurring at a different, maybe much earlier point in time. But it's been a long time and maybe King did explicitly say that it was still the post-Trips world.
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Jan 26, 2015 21:02
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savinhill posted:I had the same reaction basically. I think for me it might have been because the book started out so dark, what with the Rev's family getting wiped out in that brutally described car crash after becoming attached to them in the book's first act and none of the other horror-type stuff that happened after that came close to matching the dread of that one scene for me. Yeah, as the father of a toddler, that scene shook me up pretty good. Had to put the book down for a day or so. What the Rev was screaming there isn't something I want to think about ever again. Sometimes King is really good at plain old human grief and emotional pain as a horror device. Nothing else in that book came close to it.
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Jan 28, 2015 06:12
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One of my long-term projects is to acquire first trade editions of each Dark Tower hardcover. Working my way backward and all I need are the first two. The Wizard and Glass 1st-trade is sweet & I got it for a steal since my local used bookshop didn't realize its value.
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Jan 28, 2015 20:55
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syscall girl posted:I don't have to imagine. Yeah, leaving them on Blaine for the better part of a decade was terrible, but not as bad as the period right after King's accident. I was sure the son of a bitch was going to die without getting the series past IV.
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Mar 9, 2015 15:38
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Talmonis posted:It wasn't nearly as terrible as it alluded to be though. It could have been far more horrifying. Heck, most representations of the Christian Hell are worse than that. I think the really horrifying part is supposed to be that everyone goes there, no matter what, which is significantly beyond any prior depiction of hell. Now, whether or not that works for any given reader is a mileage-may-vary thing.
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Mar 31, 2015 19:57
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Thanks to whoever originally mentioned Nick Cutter. I just plowed through The Deep and I'm starting on The Troop. But yeah, the whole comparison to Sphere just made me start a re-read. It was one of my favorite books when I was a kid, so it's kind of interesting to revisit something like that more than a quarter-century later.
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Aug 11, 2015 14:55
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Advice posted:Yeah, what the gently caress was with that, anyway? I know King likes to reference his other works a lot, but even I was rolling my eyes at Jake's time in Derry, and I absolutely loved It(the novel). Meeting up with Bev and Richie was out of place, it felt weird that they just implicitly trusted him after they had been through this traumatic event, as though they psychically knew he wasn't a bad guy, and then it was weird because I thought Pennywise was supposed to be resting or recovering or whatever but there he is, tempting Jake into coming toward him. Isn't that exactly what It did to Georgie? So how is it weakened or hiding at all if it's still engaging anyone nearby? King can't help himself, he has to tie things into his overarching universe. I didn't think it was jarringly out-of-place, but that's mostly because we've come to expect that sort of thing from him.
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Feb 24, 2016 17:49
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Canuckistan posted:Idris Elba and Matthew Mcconaughey are confirmed and the movie is a go. Interesting that they're going to start the series somewhere in the middle and fill in the backstory along the way. McConaughey's also playing Randall Flagg in the upcoming film series of The Stand, which is fitting because the man in black named Walter was one of Flagg's personas.
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Mar 1, 2016 17:21
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Many pieces, most of them insignificant, of the last three books were bad. Some pieces were actually quite good. And I'll defend the ending to my grave. It was the only way he could have ended it, he planned to do it that way for years if not decades, it was fully consistent with Roland's arc, and anyone who thought he was going to destroy/change/fix the Dark Tower is retarded and wasn't paying attention to any of it. Come at me bro.
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Apr 17, 2016 04:02
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Mister Kingdom posted:As Roland enters the desert, he needs to look behind himself and see the outline of a door disappearing into the air. Better: as the opening shot begins (whatever the shot might be of), we hear a door slam.
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May 25, 2016 17:46
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Yessss confirmed that he's got the Horn of Eld with him this time and that it's the last cycle. So pleased they went this direction with the concept.
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Jul 23, 2016 19:14
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Cast Iron Brick posted:I'll happily defend Revival as my favorite King novel despite it being not incredibly original. I think it's his best prose in a novel by far. I agree. His craft has more or less steadily improved throughout his career (modulo the obviously drug-fueled text here and there), but as Josef says, his judgment has continued to cost him quite a bit of the quality he might otherwise have achieved. I've basically fallen off the King train after about Revival -- though it was good, I've just not felt compelled to read anything lately he's done.
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Aug 7, 2016 23:20
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Aquarium Gravel posted:Speaking of King's penchant for annoying repetition, I'm listening to Wolves of the Calla right now and chap chap chap chap chap do ya. Great, now I've been walking around in the office muttering "chap chap chap chap do ya". It's got some weird kind of compulsive ring to it.
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Sep 2, 2016 17:06
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Tom Guycot posted:I believe that collection also has the scariest story he ever wrote in it, to me anyways, The Jaunt. Man, that still comes back to me and gives me nightmares, I don't think its fully left my brain since I read that in highschool. LONGER THAN YOU THINK, DAD! LONGER THAN YOU THINK!
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Sep 27, 2017 14:41
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polishthunder84 posted:lol'd pretty had at this. I've tried picturing in my mind what a commala would look like and all I could come up with is a combination of tap dancing and a Cossack dance. Idk. For me it's pretty much just Irish step dancing
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Oct 29, 2017 21:09
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Karmine posted:I'm reading the Long Walk right now and I'd totally watch a movie of this poo poo, it's excellent. I'm also trying to imagine if a stage adaptation is logistically feasible, because that's precisely the kind of dweeb I am. Room-sized treadmill, Jamiroquai-style.
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May 8, 2018 15:42
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Karmine posted:They shot that video by building a box the size of a small room, fixing a camera to one of the walls, and pushing the box around. Mind blown. I always assumed there had to be some kind of simple trick.
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May 15, 2018 14:14
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Good setup, bad follow-through. I am shocked, simply stunned that a Stephen King novel called "The [Noun]" would turn out this way.
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May 24, 2018 22:15
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FlashFearless posted:I feel like ever since Dr. Sleep, his writing has taken on a strange Saturday morning cartoon tone. I don't know how better to describe it. If you knew nothing about his books, and you just took King's bibliography and studied the prose, you could manage to order it by age/date pretty faithfully. Dude is getting old, and his style is becoming less subtle, because old brains do that.
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Feb 7, 2019 20:55
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Douche4Sale posted:It's been a very long time since I saw it, but I remember thinking it was well done. I don't think it had as much killing as in the book, and remember it ends differently, and there were probably a few other things different that didn't stand out as much  well now I'm not gonna watch it, thanks for that.I remember enjoying the novella (?) quite a bit, along with most of the story compilations he was releasing in those years. You guys have been tempting me to dig back into some of those old stories, it's perfect for my reading time these days which is limited to short bursts.
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Mar 21, 2022 00:11
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NikkolasKing posted:So this is kind of a larger question but I'm focusing it here on King. To me, his work is very different after the accident. His ratio of good books to crap books seems to be about the same, but his themes have shifted toward humanism and away from nihilism (again this is a general statement and individual works do buck that trend, e.g Revival) and his style hasn't really changed except he seems a bit more willing to enhance his prose whereas he used to focus on ripping through the story at lightning speed rather than making the reader work for anything.
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Mar 23, 2022 17:22
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I think what I mean by "nihilism" there is more properly described as "existential horror" based around how indifferent the universe (and the baddies in it) are to human life and society. Manichaean, yes, but that's on a scale larger than the human. Think about how Derry experiences the Tommyknockers after they discover the aftermath of what is essentially a meaningless accident. He still works in that mode these days, but I think he tempers it more often with humanist tones than he used to. For example, If he was forced to update those early books, I think we would get a lot more editions that are about the characters and their internal lives, than editions that are about the forces/demons/whatever the story is ostensibly "about".
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Mar 23, 2022 18:26
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